STRANGE FACTS

Bay of Plenty Times, Volume LXV, Issue 12390, 30 July 1937, Page 7 (Supplement)

STRANGE FACTS

MYSTERIES OF SCIENCE “If all the people in Europe talked at once the energy Avould just run a motor-cycle,” says Cyril Dalmaine in a book revie AA r . Take air pressure. As you read this article there’s a pressure of air on your back far greater than you could lift—ll2olb. A mile dOAvn in the sea, the pressure on, say, an average-sized cod is about 120 tons—the Aveight of a large' railway engine. Yet the cod, like you, feels nothing. Glance round the room. The. air in it weighs as much as a small wo-' man. Look at your electric lamp. The amount of current it consumes in a minute is enough to produce a flash of storm lightning. Feel your heart. Your blood may he pumping through it at the rate of eight gallons a minute. Compare Avith your kitchen tap, Avhich only gives you an average of four gallons. The sun throws off into space energy at the rate of 50,000,000,000,000,000.000,000 h.p. One inch of the sun gives enough energy to run a 50-h.p. engine continuously. Similarly, should you wish to boil a kettle of water on the mpon, you’d leave it standing about in the sunlight and it would boil. So,- probably you. You’remember “Big Bertha” shelling Paris from seventy-six miles aAvay? Those shells, at the top of their course, reached a height of twenty-four miles! Look at tAVO locomotives standing in a goods yard. Two inanimate objects, you may think. Not at all. They’re attracted to one another AA'ith “a force of gravity equal to the AA'eight of a penny. Doavu we go, through London’s